Centering Communities of Color for Better Policymaking

The United States has a long history of putting policies and systems in place that disenfranchise communities of color, leaving them without the same access to opportunities as their white counterparts. When unemployment insurance was first created under the New Deal, it left out jobs primarily held by Black and Latinx workers at the time: agriculture and domestic work. And despite the fact that many Black soldiers risked their lives to fight in World War II, most were structurally excluded from the benefits that came from the sweeping GI Bill. Though Asian immigrants played an integral role in building the infrastructure of the West Coast, they were barred from becoming citizens or owning land in some states. Even today, Black and Latinx workers are underrepresented in higher-paying jobs than white workers, regardless of their education level, due to systematic barriers like discrimination and occupational segregation.

We know systemic problems require systemic solutions. The pandemic has revealed deep fractures in our society, as the COVID-19 crisis has ravaged some communities and not others. To recover and rebuild a more equitable America, we must ensure that our policies meet the needs and center the voices of all Americans — especially the most vulnerable.

At New America Chicago, we are working to do just that. In close partnership with The Chicago Community Trust, we harness the cross-cutting expertise of New America as a D.C.-based policy institute along with the deep local knowledge of Chicago communities to ensure the government puts the people closest to the issues front and center. Our institutions believe that community members carry knowledge and expertise about the challenges they face and know best what solutions are required to overcome them. Policy interventions must create space for their perspectives from the very outset to ensure meaningful, lasting change.

Working towards this goal of community-informed policymaking, New America and The Chicago Community Trust (The Trust) began our partnership in 2018, embedding a New America Fellow at The Trust as part of New America Local. The initial collaboration was intended as a learning exchange for both organizations — New America would connect with new initiatives and efforts coming out of Chicago, while The Trust and other local leaders would learn from New America’s innovators. For The Trust, this was an important opportunity to gain new insights from other projects across the country as we were developing a new strategic plan.

We harness the cross-cutting expertise of New America … along with the deep local knowledge of Chicago communities to ensure the government puts the people closest to the issues front and center.

In 2019, The Trust launched its new strategic plan with a moonshot vision to close the racial and ethnic wealth gap. This goal acknowledged that despite the fact that segregation has been illegal for decades, the wealth gap between white families and communities of color has actually widened in recent years, requiring intensive action. This marked an intentional shift in focus, from being a grantmaker to an organization focused on making meaningful policy and systems change. The New America–Trust partnership has supported The Trust’s increasing focus on advocating for policy change, allowing them to tap into existing expertise and innovative policy ideas to help create the conditions for families of color in the Chicago region to build wealth and achieve economic security.

To date, our collaboration has focused on two policy areas: predatory lending and tax credits. Both issues threaten the economic stability of Black and Latinx communities. Each year, predatory lending strips over $261 million dollars in high interest fees from majority Black and Latinx Chicago-area communities. Tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit are particularly successful at reducing poverty but often don’t reach the lowest income Americans. Both were also chosen because New America brought additional capacity and unique skills to the local space.

While we know transformational success takes time, the New America–Trust partnership has resulted in a number of wins toward our goal of ending the racial and ethnic wealth gap. These include:

• Reaching the most vulnerable with financial support during a crisis: When COVID stimulus checks were rolled out, communities that needed them most — those with the lowest incomes — were left out because they were not part of the tax system. Through The Trust-supported Get My Payment Illinois Coalition, New America developed a website and outreach strategy to help Illinoisans to access the stimulus checks, the expanded EITC, and monthly Child Tax Credit payments. Over 200,000 people received the support they needed to unlock thousands of dollars in pandemic relief. Drawing on insights from platform users, the team is now exploring ways to simplify how low-income filers receive both the CTC and EITC.
• Fighting predatory lending through policy and education: In partnership with Woodstock Institute and the Chicago Urban League, New America Chicago launched WeProsper, a joint initiative to help protect families from predatory financial practices that strip wealth from low-income communities. The initiative sought to educate policymakers and the public on how payday lending with interest rates as high as 400 percent target and strip wealth from communities of color. As a result, historic legislation passed in 2021 that caps consumer loan interest rates at 36 percent, saving Illinoisans $400,000,000 annually. New America Chicago is beginning new user research to discover how policy can support more affordable loan alternatives for consumers.
• Engaging communities to learn from lived experience: Our team has amplified local voices and experiences across a number of initiatives. We led efforts to listen to a broad group of community voices with The Trust and the BECOME Center, to support a cutting-edge equitable recovery initiative: We Rise Together: For an Equitable and Just Recovery. Our research uncovered just how hard the pandemic had hit Black and Latinx communities in disinvested areas of Chicago and guided the We Rise team in developing a strategy to invest in businesses and job creation focused on ensuring the hardest-hit areas were able to bounce back better than before.

The through line across our efforts is a shared interest in centering community voices in advocating for and implementing policy change. As we look ahead, New America Chicago and The Trust will continue to work together to amplify local voices and engage those with lived experience in the policy design process through a new initiative called CivicSpace. This community policy innovation hub aims to center the end-user at every stage of the policy design process from issue identification to policy redesign and reauthorization. Early activities will include creating a paid community researcher corps to assess how well policies meet community needs, expanding user research of policy innovations, and engaging community members and leading thinkers in design sessions.

Our joint goal is to learn from the experiences of community members to make our systems work better for everyday people and eliminate barriers to building wealth. With this shared commitment, we will continue our work to ensure a more vibrant economic future for communities across Chicago and beyond — to advance systems that work for all people, not just a select few.

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